Hadoop Takes Innovation Prize

This week Hadoop won an award, continued its development and learned of a new competitor.

Why the Hoopla over Hadoop?

Hadoop in nine easy to understand facts.

The Guardian awarded Apache Hadoop with its "Innovator of the Year" award as part of the MediaGuardian Innovation Awards in London. Described as the "Swiss Army Knife of the 21st century," the judges believed Hadoop was a greater catalyst for innovation than other nominees, which included the iPad and WikiLeaks, The Guardian reports.

The award-winning software isn't resting on its laurels and Yahoo developers are working on the next generation of Hadoop by looking at ways to improve its utilization, scheduling and management of resources, says Computerworld. According to Arun Murthy, who leads the Apache Hadoop MapReduce Development Team at Yahoo, the new architecture will include a global ResourceManager that tracks machine availability and scheduling invariants while a per-application Application Master runs inside the cluster and tracks the program semantics for a given job.

The improvements will not only be welcomed, but are needed. MapR Technologies is "engineering game changing Map/Reduce related technologies" that will look to rival Hadoop, says GigaOM.